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Snowboard Snowjob
Wednesday, July 2 2008
It was another perfect summer day, with sunny skies and a bit cooler than normal for this time of year. Gretchen had just weeded the garden along the side of the house and I had just mowed the lawn with the more reliable of the two human-powered spool mowers. I started tossing around a Xbox 360-branded frisbee, one of many items of schwag acquired at Bonnaroo '08. At first I was throwing the frisbee just for Julius the cat (mostly known as "Stripey"). He'd watch it land and run up to slap it with his paw. Clarence the cat was nearby, but he was more afraid of the frisbee than intrigued by it. After Stripey's interest had peaked (at around throw number five), Sally the dog paid increasing attention. Gretchen and I tossed it back and forth over her head, but eventually she grabbed it and ran off into the weedy area near the road to chew on it. (Sally has developed a warren of trails and nests throughout this two thousand square foot piece of reforesting yard.) After I'd recovered the frisbee from Sally and ascertained the damage it had sustained, I wished I'd gotten more at Bonnaroo. I could have had as many as I wanted, so desperate is Microsoft to promote the Xbox 360 brand to the young stoner demographic.
Later Gretchen and I spent about fifteen minutes flinging a basketball at the hoop that hangs above our household parking lot. Our elderly cat Marie (mostly known as "the Baby") blithely wandered amid the action, and we'd occasionally have to dive after the ball to keep it from bouncing off her tiny bony body, the aftermath of which we definitely didn't want to see. It bears noting that when one only throws a ball at a basket for fifteen minutes every two or three years, the absence of skills is a difficult thing to finesse.
This evening Gretchen and I watched a DVD of the movie Whole New Thing, the tale of what happens when a bright 13 year old boy homeschooled in a hippie house made of hay bails is enrolled in a public school. It isn't long before he's been beaten up for being a fag. Then he makes plain his dim view of Snowboard Snowjob, the book assigned by the school's English curriculum. So the teacher chucks the book (literally) and replaces it with Shakespeare's As You Like It. Ah, but then our young lad develops a crush on the English teacher, who has been shown frequenting a public men's room for sex with anonymous men. Both Gretchen and I loved the movie, though I was a little disappointed to find in subsequent research that the book Snowboard Snowjob doesn't actually exist.
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